“... brute! What’s the use – he’ll be right in again?’ His most famous example, in a letter to John Bartlett, is full of provocations: The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Ask yourself how these sentences would sound without the words in which they are embodied: You mean to tell me you ...”

“... after the last four years’; ‘Heavens, what a vale of tears it is’; ‘Oh heavens, now John Ashbery and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that ...”

“... is over.’ Peter Fonda: ‘We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with paedophiles.’ Advisers to the president and members of his cabinet have been mobbed and jeered, denied service in restaurants, and harassed at home; and more such actions have been urged by the woke contingent of the Democratic Party. Representative ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... on the previous century’s instruments. ‘The violins of Cremona,’ the historian of music John Hawkins wrote in 1776, ‘are exceeded only by those of Stainer, a German, whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone.’ A French encyclopedia entry on the making of stringed instruments similarly argued that the violins of Jacob Stainer ...”

“... unoccupied for more than two minutes they would inevitably bugger each other. I share with Sir John Betjeman the fate of having been educated at a public school so steeped in the Arnold tradition that, when we were there, water closets were doorless: but perhaps the Laureate was exaggerating when, later in life, he said that he did not have a bowel ...”

“... childhood onwards, Tagore had been looking out of windows and partitions; the word khancha, or ‘cage’, recurs in the songs and poems, and there is a concern with the possibilities and avenues of egress which is common in victims of a disciplinary society. When Tagore published his first book of songs at the age of 16, he was praised by the foremost writer ...”

“... affair than it actually is. It is striking that authoritative Rousselians such as Ford or John Ashbery, one of Roussel’s earliest and still most unflagging supporters, seem to describe his work with a beguiling sense of calmness and equanimity, in a tone a bit like that of a pathologist describing a wound to a colleague. In a wonderfully ...”

“... unexpected story of continuity in small things. Yes, someone painted swastikas on Fritz’s rabbit cage, but the rabbits were safely moved to his grandmother’s garden. Yes, the family saw anti-semitic signs in a village they drove through near Breslau en route to a holiday cottage, but when their car went into a ditch on the way home a bus stopped to help ...”

“... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...”

“... Yet he, too, makes of the poet what the title of one of his book’s most appreciative reviews, John Carey’s, called ‘The Hollow Man’. Moreover this is not, in Ackroyd’s case, a mere technicality, an unfortunate function of the concept of biography as necessarily external. His Life firmly presents Eliot as characterised by an essential emptiness at ...”

“... The Waste Land. The second epitaph to Sweeney Agonistes, published in 1926, is a quotation from St John of the Cross: ‘Thus the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union until it has divested itself of the love of created beings.’ This conviction is reaffirmed not only in the poetry up to and through Four Quartets, but in his letters to friends like ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... are occupied. There’s no sign of the superstore, but the promised food outlets are open: Papa John’s Pizza, Burger King and Greggs. One evening I drove down a dark country lane on the edge of Wyberton to the home of Richard Austin, who led the Bypass Independents to victory in 2007. He’s in his eighties now. His wife, Alison, is also involved in local ...”

“... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...”